Experimenting with 3D Printing, the wild imaginations of strangers on the internet, and calibration frustrations

During the pandemic, as many others did, I sought new hobbies to keep my interest, and it was wither going to be spend more money on LEGO, or buy a 3D printer. Turns out to be one of the highest skill-ceiling hobbies I have endevoured to take on.

Starting my 3D printing journey I picked up the Ender 3 V2 from Amazon on a Black Friday sale. My intent with it was to make cool nick-nacks, print useful replacement parts & possibly make some gifts for friends and family.

Ultimately, after a few months of tinkering, I found the experience of using the Ender 3 V2 to be quite frustrating and very time consuming. My first 1-2 weeks was spent tinkering with levelling, flow calibration, and heat management - but we ended up with some pretty nice looking prints. I found the process of manually levelling each time I wanted to print something quite frustrating, so I endeavoured to spend some money to make the process as simple as possible - I purchased some stronger springs for the bed, for some finer tuning, as well as an automatic bed-leveller with the BLTouch, this, unfortunately was my downfall. From this point, my prints were never of the same quality - bed adhesion and layer lines were always a problem. Following a few weeks of tinkering with no significant improvement to results, I opted to retire my Ender 3 V2 to the garage to collect dust out of frustration.

Below is a connection of some of the items I managed to make during my successful days that didn’t turn out too bad